Нэнси Кресс - Terran Tomorrow

Mother Terra? Well, in a phrase she had learned from Claire Patel: why not? This was the original Mother of all Worlders, after all.

Monterey Bay grew larger and more dazzling. A single dome like those at the base came into view, less blue and shimmering than the ocean. Beside it stretched cultivated fields and orchards like those at home. A river splashed through a small waterfall surrounded by wooden structures. More structures extended from the mouth of the river out into the ocean; those were filled with intensely green slime.

Small figures ran from fields and bay into the dome. Colonel Jenner set down the quadcopter beside it, and the figures, people-sized now, ran out again. Jane was shocked to see that the airlock to the dome stood wide open. Didn’t RSA spores contaminate everything inside?

The quadcopter noise stopped. The armed soldier jumped out, followed by Colonel Jenner. In the sudden silence, someone spoke: an older woman, gray-haired and scowling. She wore what Jane still thought of as normal clothes: a simple wrap of undyed cloth that looked homespun, with sandals of cloth and thin wood. No esuit. She said flatly, “Colonel Jenner. Such an honor. Something wrong with the last shipment?”

“No. Hello, Sarah. Nice to see you, too.”

She snorted. Then Marianne and Jane climbed out of the quadcopter and Sarah’s sunken eyes went round as buttons. “Oh my God, you’re Kindred .”

“I greet you,” Jane said in English. Sarah stared and shook her head. What did that mean?

Marianne said, “I’m Marianne Jenner. Hello, Sarah.”

Sarah found her voice. “The Friendship returned to Earth?”

Colonel Jenner said, “Not exactly. Is Colin around?”

Sarah said, “He’ll be on his way here. Dr. Jenner…”

“Yes?”

Sarah seemed to have found not only her voice but also a commanding stance. Was she then the mother of this lahk? She put her hands on her hips and demanded, “Are you staying here? Are you with us or them?”

Colonel Jenner said, “With us. She’s a scientist, Sarah. And Jane is our translator.”

Sarah said to Marianne, “You choose death over life?”

Marianne, bewildered, turned to Colonel Jenner. He said tightly, “Here comes Colin.”

A man ran toward them from the beach. Jane watched the pounding figure grow larger and stockier; a thickset, short, heavily muscled Terran deeply sunburned. He wore the same type of wrap as Sarah but was barefoot, his long graying hair tied back with a strip of cloth. When he spied Jane, he stopped dead.

His gaze moved to Colonel Jenner, and he smiled, a grin of such unself-conscious sweetness that Jane felt her own lips curve in response.

He saw Marianne, gasped, and burst into tears.

Marianne took an uncertain step forward. Colin Jenner closed the gap between them in five huge bounds and threw his arms around her, lifting her off the ground in a hug so tight that Jane was afraid it might break her old bones. But Marianne was hugging him back and laughing like a girl.

“Grandma! You’re home! But how—”

“There was a time dilation, it—”

Sarah shouted, “Incoming!”

Everyone moved toward the dome, but not very quickly. Colin took Marianne’s hand and led her. Jane hurried behind. Again she was shocked to see that the airlock stood open on both sides, and even more shocked that Colonel Jenner’s guard took time to climb into the quadcopter, start it, and fly it around to the other side of the dome and, presumably, inside an airlock as big as the one in the armory of Enclave Dome.

Still no explosions.

She said timidly to Sarah, “I don’t hear anything.”

“Oh, it’ll be another ten minutes at least.”

There hadn’t been ten minutes warning at the base. “How do you know?”

“Grasses,” Sarah said, which explained nothing. “Would you like some tea?”

“I… no, I can’t drink in this esuit.”

“Oh, of course. I forgot. Poor you.”

Jane didn’t think that Sarah had forgotten, or that her remark had really been aimed at Jane. Colonel Jenner frowned at the old woman.

Marianne was answering Colin Jenner’s questions about his uncle, Noah, left behind on World. Jane turned in a slow circle, inspecting this quadrant of the dome. Although identical in size and alien material to the two domes of Monterey Base, this one looked entirely different inside. Plants grew against the curved walls. There was no flat ceiling of wood or metal making a second story, and through the clear upper dome sunlight poured in. Between irregularly shaped beds of grass or seaweed, woven mats lay rolled up or not; they looked like the sleeping mats on World. Children came shyly from behind trees; men and women in little knots stared openly; two people stirred a pot of something on the metal stove where Sarah brewed tea. The stove had a glass or plastic window with actual fire burning behind it.

Colonel Jenner came up beside her. “Not like the base, is it?”

“No. It’s like… an unplanned garden.”

“Oh, it’s planned, all right. My brother might be a lunatic tree-worshipper, but he’s capable.”

“Really? They worship the trees here?”

“Not literally. I meant that they’re vegetarian, refuse to slaughter animals for leather, eat a lot of seaweed—that’s a kelp farm down at the beach—and offer thanks to any tree they cut down for fuel or any vegetable they put into a stew. I think they atone for all the food they send to us killers at the base, too. Trying to make up for our sins.”

Jane tried to follow all this. “Food to the base comes by here?”

“Plus hunting and foraging by the Army. Colin’s people don’t approve of hunting, of course. We send FiVees to collect their produce and grain, varying the collection days to avoid drone attacks. In return, we supply them with medicines and such metal as they’ll accept, like the stove. We get fed and they get to keep morally clean from all the disgusting military practices that make their lives possible. Not that we get any credit for it. My brother— Hello, Dad.”

A man, walking with a cane, emerged from an internal, standing-open airlock. An older, frailer version of Colin, he trembled as he lurched along, but he grinned widely and his eyes shone. Marianne’s son, Jane remembered, the father of both Colin and Colonel Jenner. Wordlessly he patted Colonel Jenner’s arm, then stumbled toward Marianne. To Jane he looked older than Marianne.

“Is your father sick?”

“Parkinson’s. That’s a neurological disease we never did figure out how to cure. Jane, I know how strange this must seem to you.”

Actually, this place seemed less strange, more like World, than the base did. This wasn’t bu^ka^tel, but the respect for Mother Terra, the abundant plants and simple furnishing, were all echoes of World.

She said, “I don’t… aren’t drones coming?”

“Yes. Any minute now.”

“Do they have radar here? Like the base?”

“No. Colin and Sarah and some of the others are superhearers. You don’t know about that, do you? About five percent of children born from mothers infected with the original R. sporii carry a gene that gets activated in the womb. The kids hear way above and below the usual range of human hearing… do I need to say that more simply?”

“No.” Little Caitlin saying I hear the ground . “But will this also happen with children born on World? The spore cloud came only a little time before our ship left.”

“I don’t know. You need to ask a geneticist.”

Colin Jenner broke free from the group around his father and grandmother. “Jason!” He hugged Colonel Jenner, who didn’t immediately break free.

“Hello, Col.”

“How are you? You okay?”